92 Summer 2005
MAGAZINE CONTENTS
François Houle: Vancouver’s Clarinet Virtuoso develops new composition and playing techniques
by Paul Steenhuisen
Article Summary: Clarinetist François Houle discusses with composer Paul Steenhuisen the subject of musical instinct and how it applies to Houle’s playing. He outlines his reconciliation of formal training and improvisation, as well as the seemingly apparent dichotomy of style and approach between contemporary music and improvisation. What was first a divided practice became, over time, a blended approach to many types of playing. Steenhuisen’s line of questioning gets further into Houle’s many roles as performer, composer, musicologist, and more recently, Max programmer, revealing the multiplicity of thought that informs Houle’s playing—world music, free jazz, extended techniques, and spectral music. Houle discusses the research required to master a new technique, the persistence of practicing it, and the journey that is necessary before it becomes a fluid part of his playing, or, as Anthony Braxton calls it, “a force in motion.”
Mei Han, specialist on the Chinese Zheng, broadens the scope of traditional, composed and improvised music for her instrument
by John Oliver
Article Summary: Mei Han is an extraordinary virtuoso who plays the zheng, the traditional Chinese zither with twenty-one strings and moveable bridges. In the eight years since she came to Canada, she has established enduring musical relationships with a broad range of artists—improvising musicians, jazz artists, world musicians, and classical groups. This interview, conducted by composer John Oliver, who has collaborated with Mei Han, reveals her childhood and early education during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and her transformation upon her discovery of the creative and world-music scenes in Vancouver. Her thoughts about the relation of ancient Chinese qin music to contemporary music, about her work with such a range of musicians, and about the world music phenomenon in the West, make for a fascinating read.
click
here to see CD contents
Jooane Hétu began as a rock singer and songwriter and has become a prime mover in Montreal’s musicque actuelle scene
by François Couture
Article Summary: For twenty-five years Joane Hétu has been active as a saxophonist, vocalist, improviser, songwriter, composer, record label owner, co-director of a concert production company. Equally performer and businesswoman, her work has been enriching the Montreal new music scene for the past twenty-five years. As a member of Wondeur Brass, Justine, Castor et Compagnie and Nous Perçons les Oreilles, as part of the Ambiances Magnétiques collective, as head of the distribution company/record label DAME and as co-director of Productions SuperMusique, Hétu has an impressive track record and now she is more active than ever as composer and performer.
click
here to see CD contents
Charles Wuorinen: A Row is a Row is Sometimes Pitch-centric, as heard in the new opera Haroun and the Sea of Stories
by Christian Carey
Article Summary: Throughout his career, Charles Wuorinen has been a composer in the modernist tradition. His compositional idiom represents an extension of the 12-tone principles formulated by Schoenberg and later developed by Babbitt and Stravinsky. In his book Simple Composition, Wuorinen demonstrates the great number of ways in which 12-tone operations can be applied not just to pitch, but to other musical domains such as rhythm, dynamics and even large-scale formal design. Wuorinen has also contributed his own singular approach to writing post-tonal music. Influenced by Mandelbrot and fractal theory, his formal designs emphasize organic self-similarity – relating the largest aspects of a musical composition to its smallest gestures. Since the seventies, pitch centricity has also played an important structural role in his compositions. Two new works, the Fourth Piano Concerto and the opera Haroun and the Sea of Stories, are both exemplars of the rapprochement between lyricism and compositional rigor that typifies Wuorinen’s recent music.
Commentary: Widgets über Alles – Bizspeak and the Arts
by: Paul Dutton
Article Summary: Author, musician, and performer Paul Dutton tells how, in the late 1970s or early 1980s, business terminology began to be imposed on the arts. The arts community as a whole capitulated to this aberration, accepting the new and inappropriate vocabulary, and trying to justify arts activities in terms of economic models. But, Dutton points out, the arts are an expression of the human soul and spirit, rather than a saleable commodity shaped to market demands, and cannot meet the moneymaking expectations of profit-oriented business. As government funding has continued to decrease, arts organizations are expected more and more to raise funds from business, and to conform to business principles. Dutton calls on artists to reject the inappropriate terms, claiming that colonization of the mouth leads to colonization of the mind.
Now Notes: Art and Politics, part two
by: Udo Kasemets
Article Summary: In the present corrupt and greedy corporate and political climate, the continuation of the quality of human life, as we have come to cherish it, is in grave peril. If we don't act immediately and decisively, human survival will become endangered. We need to think seriously about the kind of creative action that would provide a counterforce of quality to the visual, verbal, and musical junk that now is ceaselessly thrust upon the eyes, ears, and minds of both willing and unwilling viewers and listeners by the unscrupulous peddlers of cheap thrills and vulgarity. Quality has to be restored to all kinds of art, whether it be popular or unpopular, folksy or sophisticated. Striving for quality in the world of the arts has to begin by ridding that world of the marketplace methods and value systems that now guide the administrative operations of almost all art organizations, institutions, and support bodies.
CD CONTENTS
Mei Han
1 Purple Lotus Bud 3:42 (by/par John Oliver)
2 Through the Waves 2 :35 (with/avec Paul Plimley)
3 The Greening 9:38 (by/par Minoru Miki)
4 Dragon Dogs 4:28 (with/avec Randy Raine-Reusch)
François Houle
5 Aeriali 1 13:06
6 Aeriali 12 4:50
7 Aeriali 20 1:48
Joane Hétu
8 Lumière de février 16 :17
9 NMH_Sampling 13:20
Charles Wuorinen
10 Oh I am the Ocean of Notions 1:41
11 I Wish 2:23
REVIEWS
Events:
Montréal Nouvelles Musiques (MNM) www.festivalmnm.ca.
Visual Music The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Other Minds Music Festival. , San Francisco.
Ghost Machine: A Video Walk by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Berlin.
Bradyworks hard (and plays harder) The Music Gallery, Toronto.
And by the way, Miss… URGE.
Send & Receive Festival [v. 7], Winnipeg.
Frottements. objets et surfaces sonores / Frictions. sound objects and surfaces. Quebec.
Recordings:
Ricardo Arias. Musica Global
John Butcher, Christoph Irmer, Augustí Fernández. Clearings.
John Cage and Lejaren Hiller, HPSCHD, Electronic Media Foundation
Alvin Lucier, Vespers and Other Early Works
Robert Erickson. Pacific Sirens.
Heller
Lee Hutzulak
James Fei and Kato Hideki. Sieves
Morton Feldman, "Patterns in a Chromatic Field"
Frottements a/k/a Friction: Sound Objects and Surfaces.
Petri Kuljuntausta
Anthony Burr/Charles Curtis performing works by Alvin Lucier
Midnight in the Caverns with Monte Maxwell; Elephonic Rhapsodies
Maja Ratkje and Jaap Blonk; Blonk/Makigamu/Dutton/Minton/Moss. Five Men Singing.
Randy Raine-Reusch: Bamboo, Silk and Stone.
Sub Rosa Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music
Walter Thompson.
Books:
Winter Music: Composing the North. By John Luther Adams.
Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, eds.
Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation. On-Line Journal.
